The cradle-to-grave, government-supported existence of “Julia”

posted at 1:21 pm on May 3, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

Today’s buzz surrounds the rollout of yet another composite character from the imagination of Barack Obama, this one named “Julia.” Julia represents the arc of a life under the beneficent care of Barack Obama’s policies. Interestingly, at every stage of Julia’s life, a government program exists to shield her from life’s woes. And just as interestingly, Julia never gets the bill for all of this government hand-holding.

Let’s present a more realistic view of Julia’s life:

3 years old – Julia gets a new-and-improved Head Start, which a new HHS study shows won’t do anything for her anyway.

17 years old – Race to the Top improves Julia’s SAT scores. Is there any evidence at all to support that argument? Even so, she’s down the list from all of the home-schooled children and the charter- and private-school students who actually got an education rather than an NEA indoctrination. However, thanks to the NEA indoctrination, Julia is now better prepared for a life on the government dole.

18 years old – Julia’s family qualifies for a $10,000 tuition tax credit spread out over four years, while Obama’s student-loan subsidies drive tuition costs up even faster.

22 years old – Julia undergoes surgery, which has to be funded by her parents’ employers despite Julia being an adult, and which will be most likely delayed as providers decline in number thanks to the economics of ObamaCare.

23 years old — Thanks to the Lily Ledbetter Act, trial attorneys get rich by filing lawsuits against employers that otherwise wouldn’t have been brought, leaving fewer resources to hire Julia. No college job for our intrepid Julia!

25 years old – Julia finally gets her 4-year degree in seven years, thanks to the inability to handle the tuition bubble and the lack of work. However, the good news is that the $200,000 in student loans will only hang over her head for 20 years, while taxpayers like Julia end up paying for the costs of default.

27 years old – Julia wants to have sex for the first time in her life, apparently, and is looking for contraception. Her employer would provide it for free thanks to the ObamaCare HHS mandate … if she could only find a job.

31 years old – Julia gets pregnant, which tells you all you need to know about free contraception. Oddly, Julia hasn’t gotten married first, probably because the economy is so poor by this time with the huge entitlement debt crisis breaking that no one can conceive of putting a home together. Fortunately, ObamaCare makes pregnancy possible, because until Obama took office, no one ever got pregnant, since government support and approval for it didn’t exist.

37 years old – Julia’s son Zachary, named after his sperm donor, starts school. Head Start has long since disappeared, apparently, but Race to the Top still exists. Must be a marathon.

42 years old – Julia starts a business with an SBA loan, which also apparently never existed before Obama took office. Her student loans are just three years away from defaulting onto the backs to taxpayers, so that’s good news.

65 years old – My, how time flies! (Do women do nothing of value between 42 and 65?) Julia enrolls in Medicare, which ceased to exist decades earlier, thanks to the fact that Obama and Tim Geithner didn’t have a plan to address the debt crisis — all they knew was they didn’t like anyone else’s plan. You can get the cards at Spencer’s as a gag gift.

67 years old – Julia retires, since the entitlement collapse wiped out her business and the rest of the American economy. The timeline stops here, which suggests that the IPAB probably denied her care, as she was nothing but a drain on society by this time, and the few resources they have left had to be used to pay for face lifts for members of Congress.

There you have it — a timeline filled with government interventions in a fantasy lifetime, with absolutely no sense of the cost it would take to provide Government Nanny to Julia and the rest of the country. At least they picked the right name for their fantasy woman trapped in an all-encompassing government; Julia was the name of the lead female character in George Orwell’s 1984, after all.

One point jumps out at me from Obama’s “Julia.” Not once in this timeline does Team Obama mention anything about a second Obama term. There isn’t one new policy or proposal in it. For a campaign with the slogan “Forward,” that seems a little odd. Just when does Obama plan on discussing his vision of a second term … December?

David Harsanyi blasts the nanny-state mentality that believes this scenario is cause for celebration:

In the new Barack Obama campaign piece The Life of Julia, voters can “Take a look at how President Obama’s policies help one woman over her lifetime — and how Mitt Romney would change her story.” It is one of the most brazenly statist pieces of campaign literature I can ever remember seeing.

Let’s, for the purposes of this post, set aside the misleading generalizations regarding policy in the ad (no one is innocent on that account, obviously). What we are left with is a celebration of a how a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than her own initiative or hard work. It is, I’d say, implicitly un-American, in the sense that it celebrates a mindset we have — outwardly, at least — shunned.

It is also a mindset that women should find offensively patronizing. When they’re old enough, I hope my two daughters will find the notion that their success hinges on the president’s views on college-loan interest rates preposterous. Yet, according to the “Life of Julia,” women are helpless without the guiding hand of Barack Obama.

Plus there’s this parting shot:

If you think Social Security benefits allow you to live your retirement without worry, you deserve Barack Obama.

If you think Social Security will still be around under the leadership of Obama and Geithner, you have a screw loose.

3 Years Old
Julianne’s parents read to her every night. They take time to play games with her that teach her how to count and how to solve problems. When they enroll her in kindergarten she’s ready to learn and succeed.

17 Years Old
Julianne excels in school thanks to her parents’ active involvement in her life. Her mother is a stay at home mom that carefully monitors Julianne’s homework and grades throughout her scholastic tenure. Her father takes practice SAT tests with her and encourages her to work hard.

18 Years Old
Julianne’s parents have put part of their yearly salary towards a college fund for her ever since she was born. They also encouraged her to get a part-time job in high school and required her to contribute part of her paycheck to the fund. As a result, Julianne can afford the college of her choice.

22 Years Old
During college, Julianne requires emergency surgery. She is covered by her insurance, which she can afford because it is a low-premium package designed specifically for this kind of unexpected expense. She pays for it with the part-time job she got the first week she arrived on campus.

Be sure to read it all.

Update II: Suitably Flip reworks the graphics to depict the life of Julie under Mitt Romney. It’s graphic and not excerptable, but you’ll want to see the whole thing anyway.

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Don’t forget the “parents never had college students as insurance dependents before Obamacare” meme, since Julia is only 21 or 22 at the time, and I seem to recall that most policies allowed up to somewhere in the 23-25 range previously.

This IS truly amazing. He openly admits to being a Big Government control-freak socialist/communist. What’s scary is the amount of “Americans” who buy this cr*p, and who think it’s desirable. Never has the 2nd amendment been more important.

Scared away by the same First Feminist President that signed the Lilly Ledbetter law. Julia doesn’t want a man anyway, cramps her style, sugar daddy gov. gives her more freedom you see.

Don’t worry, he’s still paying for the kid, if he hasn’t been put in jail (welcome back debtors prisons!) after losing his job and not making enough originally ordered to pay by the family court (imputed income). Gov indoctrination programs are the actual father and mother of the child.

The government in your life from start to finish, everywhere you turn, helping pay your way (with money stolen from others) and telling you what to do. Come, be permanent children in our utopia with DMV- and TSA-type agents in charge of handling you every step of the way, whether you like it or not. This the American Nightmare.

Too bad Obama refuses to provide real living examples of how many have been permanently pushed to the wayside by government largess over the years. There are millions of Americans almost permanently shackled to the government chain gang…

True, it would appear that a good number seem to like it on the plantation…free gubmint stuff and such.

But, this drawing up composite/compressed persona’s to somehow validate the evil that is being foisted upon us smacks of Leninist/Stalinist tripe or an attempt to emulate Goebbels.

This “Julia” stuff is just plain creepy.

Cue the music…[Leni Reifenstahl's camera moves out of the clouds and a small aircraft is seen juxtaposed between the rising sun and the brilliant alpine peaks]…[the music intensifies]…”Die Fahne hoch die Reihen fest geschlossen, SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt…Kam’raden die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen…” kind of creepy.

I’d bet Obama cribbed most of it from a WaPo story by Janet Cooke, anyway.

1) Wow at the war on women, and it’s amazing that (D) women are so willing to be regarded this way. I guess we should interpret something from it. Way to go, ladies. Those womens’ suffrage types from 100 years ago would be proud.

2) When did the Obama professionals start forgetting what they were doing? He’s been campaigning since he took office, and doing a fairly effective job of it. What happened to that guy? Can’t they predict the parodies of this?

I can only figure the UN has already offered him a job and he’s going to let Hillary step in around August.

You really dont know what to say about teamObama’s strategy thus far other then pathetic uber pandering.

This Julia thing is transparent even by Gibbs standards, Its like air almost. We may win just because of crap like this. Cradle to grave government intervention on display not even trying to hide it anymore.

Julia has just died, mostly because the government death panel decided that she didn’t deserve to live. Alas that she was only ever able to have one kid, and he was so in debt that he had to move to Brazil in order to get a job. Sad and alone, her untreated rheumatoid arthritis got worse, until she couldn’t move enough to feed herself. She died of neglect and starvation in the government provided housing project. After a few weeks, the government paid to cremate her body. What a sad government assistance tale. It makes the government sound like it doesn’t care about you once you are no more use to it…

…actually, that last part is true. Better to trust your family to help you out than the government. Zach would have helped her, if he still lived in the country.

They forgot to mention:
All the free lunches that Julia consumed while in public school
The earned income tax credit her parents received
The write off of mortgage debt her parents received because they bought a house they couldn’t afford for no money down thanks to Community Reinvestment Initiatives.
The free “lifeline” cellphone that Julia received as part of her medicaid package when she got pregnant.
The WIC aide she received when she got pregnant.
The free rides to her medical appointments she qualified for through WIC.
The Food Stamps and section 7 housing assistance she receives.
The utility rebate she receives through federal energy assistance programs.
Daycare subsidies so that Julia can attend job training workshops.
AFDC payments due to Zachary’s absentee father.
The free lunches that Zachary will receive when he starts school.
2 years at a time of unemployment benefits since Julia was trained for a non-existent Green Job.
Unemployment benefits while she “test drives” a couple of other jobs.
SSI disability payments for the soft tissue injury she received while riding a city bus that stopped too quickly.
SSI assistance for Zachary for his ADHD.
and, payments to Zachary as an in home caregiver for his mother’s soft tissue injury.
Federally subsidized job training assistance for Zachary
When Zachary buries his mother, the whichever city they live in will take care of her burial in a pauper’s grave.

(note – some of the disabilities assistance programs, while having a good intention, can become a trap of government red tape and are rife with abuse and fraud.)

The creepiest part of it is that it would seem that Obama’s team has done some research/focus groups/ ect. that tells them that this kind of statism will sell to Americans. While I’d rather believe that they are just crazed and out of touch, I find it hard to convince myself that they’re that stupid.

Either their research tells them this will actually sell or it’s just a set-up to get the GOP to say somehting stupid…

This isn’t your grand-father’s statist desires of old time communism or socialism, but rather Panem et Circenses – Bread and Circuses. The government will not attempt control through stalin, lenin or mao tactics, but through keeping the bellies of citizens full and their minds entertained by rubbish.

There is no need for government induced famines; rigid adherence to party, or even the elimination of free speech. Those ideas do not work; never have and never will. The statist gameplan of our President is to keep the masses distracted and entertained, that way they will handover more liberty without realizing or caring, because lets face it – we’re nearly there anyway with the idiocy levels of our electorate. This Julia character reveals the dream of Obama’s ideal citizen: dependent on government for everything and non-caring about the power they have seized in order to do so.

Amazing how even the “son” disappears as soon as he’s mentioned. Julia must be a very homely person considering the baby’s daddy is not even mentioned in the story… or did the government take care of that for her too?

12 years old – Julia wants to have sex for the first time in her life, apparently, and is looking for contraception. Her teacher would provide it for free thanks to the ObamaCare HHS mandate … if she could only give a job.